Story by Barbara Ferry
The New Mexican
February 13, 2006
Nine-year-old Jocelyn Rodriguez eats both Mexican and American candy. But given a choice, she’ll pick spicy Mexican sweets over their bland American counterparts. “It’s the chile,” she said outside Agua Fría Elementary School, where she is enrolled in the third grade. “Mexican candy is more delicious.”
Inside the school, a small photocopy of a poster displayed on a bulletin board presents a very different view of the imported sweets. Labeled “Toxic Treats,” the poster, produced by The Orange County Register as part of an investigative series, states that 112 brands of Mexican candy have been repeatedly found to contain dangerous levels of lead.
Last June, the New Mexico Health Department distributed 1,000 copies of the poster to schools, social-services offices and other places where children and parents would see them. But the posters haven’t changed the minds of Jocelyn and other children who continue to eat the candy, parents who say they doubt the contamination claims, and shopkeepers who continue to stock the suspect brands on their shelves.
“We’ve been eating candy all our lives,” said José Rodriguez, Jocelyn’s father. “If it was really dangerous, I don’t think they would sell it.” Environmental risk
Lead poisoning remains the greatest environmental risk to children, according the Centers for Disease Control, and children under 6 are especially vulnerable because their brains and central nervous systems are still being formed. For children under 6, even low exposure can result in reduced IQ , learning disabilities, attention-deficit disorders, behavioral problems, stunted growth, impaired hearing and kidney damage. Lead stored in a woman’s bones can easily be passed on to her fetus, according to the CDC. Medications can reduce elevated blood levels, but any damage that has already occurred is irreversible.
“There is no safe blood-lead level,” the CDC warns. “Consuming even small amounts of lead can be harmful.”
Lead in Mexican candy has been traced to chile and tamarind fruit that haven’t been cleaned before processing, as well as wrappers containing lead-based ink.
While the vast majority of childhood lead-poisoning cases are caused by dust and chips from lead paint, tainted candy has been recognized as a possible source for several years. The CDC says that lead-tainted candy was a possible exposure source in 150 of 1,000 elevated blood-lead-level cases reported between 2001 and 2002 in California . Lead-based Mexican folk remedies have been implicated in poisoning cases in Arizona and California.
Alarm over tainted candy caused California lawmakers to pass legislation last year regulating candy containing chile and tamarind. The law, which took effect Jan. 1, requires a division of the state’s Environmental Protection Agency to first establish the “naturally occurring” level of lead in candy. The state’s health department will then be charged with keeping contaminated candy out of stores, and violators will be subject to fines. Recalled candy still for sale
The shelves of three El Paisano stores in Santa Fe display sticky mango and chile-flavored lollipops, clay pots of gooey tamarind paste and small canisters of chile and lime-flavored salt, including brands that have tested high for lead in California. The Airport Road branch of the store sells two types of seasonings , Lucas Acidito and Super Lucas, that were voluntarily recalled from the market by their manufacturer a year and a half ago. Two other types of Lucas seasonings, Lucas Limon and Lucas con Chile, were also withdrawn, while other Lucas products remain on the market.
Popular with both kids and adults, the seasonings are sprinkled on fruit, served with beer or eaten “straight” as candy.
Samples of Lucas Acidito tested high for lead seven of 13 times, according to The Orange County Register. The seasonings were manufactured by a Mexican company owned by Mars, the makers of M&Ms; and dozens of other American candy brands.
Mars maintains the product was safe, but has purchased and destroyed 10.5 million canisters of the seasonings since deciding to recall the four products in 2004.
Alice Nathanson, a spokeswoman for Masterfoods USA, a division of Mars, said the company has worked aggressively to eliminate “virtually all” of the recalled products. “It is not our intention that they are sold,” Nathanson said. “If they are still on the shelves, we would like to know about it, so we can buy them back.”
Juan Andre, manager of El Paisano stores, said he would be happy to sell the Lucas products back to Mars. But he, like other storekeepers interviewed, was skeptical that Lucas and other Mexican candies could be harmful .
“In my opinion, the bodies of Mexicans and the bodies of Americans are different,” Andre said. “You go to Mexico and the water makes you sick, we come up here and McDonald’s make us sick.”
Another storekeeper, Mariola Martinez, owner of La Tiendita on Rufina Circle, said that if Mexican candies were really dangerous, government officials would have banned them.
“Nobody from the health department has ever come here to tell me to take them off my shelves,” Martinez said.
Leticia Ayala of the San Diego-based Environmental Health Coalition, which campaigned for California’s new candy-regulation law, says she often sees Mexican immigrant families doubting that their favorite candies could represent a health hazard.
“It’s very confusing to a lot of people, including parents, because they see that these candies are still on the shelves, so they believe they are safe,” Ayala said.
“What we tell them, is we’re not against the candies; we love our candies. What we’re against is the lead.”
‘Overworked and underfunded’
In California the health department tests candies, posts tests results on its Web site and has issued health alerts about some candies. California’s attorney general, joined by environmental groups, filed a lawsuit, which is still pending, against Mexican candy manufacturers under a state law banning the sale of products that cause birth defects.
California’s lead-poisoningprevention bureau is an entire branch of the state’s health department, with a budget of $20 million. In contrast, New Mexico’s health department has one part-time coordinator for lead-poisoning prevention and lead-poisoning case management for the entire state and an annual budget of between $22,000 and $24,000.
“You could say we’re overworked and underfunded,” said Julianne Vollmer who juggles lead-poisoning prevention with work on childhood asthma. Vollmer said she spends much of her time managing the cases of children with high lead levels, traveling around the state to visit the homes of those with the highest levels to try to identify the source of lead and help the family remove it.
California requires all children enrolled in its Medicaid program, called MediCal, to be tested for lead at 12 and 24 months of age. But New Mexico has no state or federal funding for lead testing, so primary-care doctors are asked to voluntarily test children, Vollmer said.
As a result, few children in New Mexico are tested. Of the 6,000 children tested last year, Vollmer said that “perhaps 1 percent” had elevated blood-lead levels.
While the number of cases is small, Vollmer said, each case represents “serious implications for that child and for that child’s family.”
“It can mean lowered IQ and the child winding up in special education,” she said.
Vollmer said the lead-poisoning cases she sees include those where the exposure was from lead paint and contaminated soil, parents whose jobs expose them to lead and who inadvertently bring it home on their clothes, and some cases where children were exposed overseas prior to adoption.
Vollmer said she believed lead-tainted candy is a part, but not a significant part, of the lead problem. Given that few children are being tested here, “it’s hard to say what the lead picture is in New Mexico,” she added. In the past, the CDC funded New Mexico for lead testing, but the grant ended in the 1990s, Vollmer said. Children without insurance, including immigrant children, “are probably falling through the cracks,” she said.
Because the program has practically no funding, the state isn’t testing candy, either. “We would have to reimburse the state lab for that, and we just don’t have the resources,” Vollmer said. A multinational responsibility
Tom Lindsey, a general surgeon in Ruidoso who serves on the United States-Mexico Border Health Commission, believes that New Mexico should test more children for lead poisoning. But protecting them from lead-tainted candy is ultimately a federal responsibility , as well as Mexican responsibility , he says.
Lindsey became concerned about the issue when a teacher in Columbus, N.M., asked him whether the Mexican candy she saw her students eating was good for them.
He couldn’t give the teacher a clear answer, so he asked the commission to investigate.
The commission, made up of representatives and health secretaries from the border states of both countries, held a two-day workshop on candy and other sources of lead contamination in El Paso in January.
Lindsey said that what came out of that meeting is that federal officials hadn’t analyzed or shared information they’ve gathered over the past decade from states. “California and Texas in particular ran studies on a large number of candies. But the information was never synthesized and shared. It never got back down to the people who need to know. You could say it went into a black hole,” Lindsey said.
The Food and Drug Administration issued a long-awaited draft of a new guidance for lead levels in candy in December , lowering the allowable limit from .5 parts per million to .1 parts per million. While applauding the lower limit, Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N .M., criticized the proposal, charging in a letter that the FDA was taking away its own authority to enforce it.
“FDA is abrogating its current enforcement policy without replacing it with anything other than a recommendation with no teeth,” Bingaman wrote in the Jan. 25 letter.
Acting FDA Commissioner Dr. Andrew von Eschenbach said in a news release that the new guidance level “will further reduce an already minimal risk from lead exposure in candy.”
The FDA is taking public comments on its proposal, and Lindsey said that at the meeting in El Paso, FDA representatives agreed to strengthen the enforcement language.
For Lindsey, the solution ultimately lies in getting Mexican candy manufacturers to adhere to stricter standards. According to The Orange County Register, after concerns about lead prompted California to embargo some candies, some Mexican manufacturers started producing a cleaner “lead-free” version for export to the United States, while continuing to use cheaper, tainted ingredients in candies made for consumption in Mexico.
“If they can make a product that’s acceptable for this country, then they should just make that product,” Lindsey said. The Environmental Health Coalition’s Ayala hopes that with time, California’s new law will reshape the entire Mexican candy industry. But she’s frustrated that the process has taken so long. “They took it out of paint. They took it out of gasoline,” she said. “How are we tolerating it in candy that’s specifically targeted to little children?” Contact Barbara Ferry at 995-3817 or bferry@sfnewmexican .com. ON THE WEB The National Safety Council; Facts about lead poisoning: www.nsc.org Centers for Disease Control: Lead in Candy, Questions and Answers: www.cdc.gov/nceh/lead/faq/candy.htm FDA’s proposed guidance on lead in candy: www.fda.gov/ bbs/topics/NEWS/2005/NEW01284.html The Orange County Register’s “Toxic Treat” poster of candy that has tested high for lead: www.njcitizenaction.org/leadposterenglish .pdf